Inside Photoshop

Don’t be fooled by the complexity of illusions

by Amy Palermo

When you’re planning the creation of a new piece of art in Photoshop, creating an illusion may come to mind. With Photoshop, anything is possible; a staircase can float in space and a dog can go snorkeling. You can create situations that never happened, as shown in Figure A, and fool people into believing they did. To accomplish this task in a manner that is believable and compelling, you need to understand how the elements of your design interact with each other, and how the human eye perceives these elements. By keeping these things in mind, you’ll be able to create visually stunning pieces, no matter what the context.

Figure A:

Prominent in the late 1950’s thru the mid-1960’s, Op Art is also known as Optical Art. Op Art is characterized by patterns of lines and shapes arranged in a certain order to create pulsating images, foreground and background disturbances, color distortion, and many other visual effects. The primary focus of Op Art is to fool the eye, and is often accomplished through elements such as chromatic tension and the arrangement of geometric shapes to create the illusion of perspective.